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THERE is nothing in the theater quite like a prize fight – the ancient Greek protagonist/ antago nist, winner-take-all with, as Richard Milhous Nixon jocularly threatened David Frost just before their historic TV interviews, “no holds barred.”

The ring is Peter Morgan’s play “Frost/Nixon,” which opened yesterday at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, and the urbane but deadly combatants are, on our left, Michael Sheen (Frost) and, on our right, Frank Langella (Nixon).

We know who won. It is the job of the actors and the director (referee, perhaps?) Michael Grandage to make it interesting. And do they ever.

You watch with the kind of fascinated delight rare in the theater as Langella and Sheen go at one another with the dedicated skill of a Muhammad Ali and a Joe Frazier.

It is 1977. Three years earlier, a disgraced President Nixon had resigned, later to be pardoned by his successor, President Gerald Ford.

He had never admitted blame for any coverup following the Watergate break-in, nor had he admitted or apologized to the American people for any abuse of executive privilege.

Now the British TV talk-show host David Frost, after beating Mike Wallace and CBS in a bidding war, persuaded Nixon – for the sum of $600,000 – to submit to a series of TV grillings.

Nixon was happy enough with the payday, but, more important, he and his loyalists felt this was the golden opportunity to salvage both his reputation and his heritage, and maybe even get him back into the game as a political player.

The more so as Frost was generally regarded as a lightweight, puffball interviewer – something of a playboy whose own once-glittering, now-spiraling career called for a little redemption, and whose bank account could do with a little bolstering.

Morgan (Oscar-nominated screenwriter of “The Queen”) has produced a fictional docudrama of the circumstances and outcome of the interviews, which reverberated in the nation’s psyche and received the largest viewership ever for a news program.

Morgan picks his way through history with the loving care of a man stepping through a minefield. He embroiders where he can; he sticks to the record where he must. Best of all, he offers enthrallingly convincing, larger-than-caricature portraits of his battling heroes.

Grandage puts the piece onstage with video-style grace, as if it were the partly imagined backstory of a movie documentary, which it actually is.

This all-important impression is endorsed by telling use of a bank of 36 small TV monitors that coalesce into one screen image – itself so cleverly fragmented that, while a living presence, it doesn’t demand attention away from the live actors.

So both Morgan, with his totally credible script, and Grandage, with his masterly fluid staging, have done an expert job.

But all the expertise in the world – including a fine crew of admirable backup actors – is going to be blown away if the two top guns fail in their missions.

Of course they don’t – the show would not have jetted to Broadway from London’s estimable but small Donmar Warehouse if they had.

Michael Sheen (best remembered for his effusive Tony Blair in “The Queen” and perhaps his bouncy Mozart in Broadway’s “Amadeus”) has caught precisely Frost’s blazingly evasive smile sliding off his face, his shrewd camaraderie, and his battened-down insecurities.

The great Langella looks rather more like a wasted Ed Sullivan than Nixon, but he has the voice down to a gravelly insinuation of just the right Nixon gravitas, and, as much as Sheen, he is a virtuoso of body language.

In all, “Frost/Nixon” is one of those definitive Broadway experiences.